Gunship Over Angola

Originally designed as an Alpine rescue helicopter, the Alo III had been reconfigured by the Rhodesian and South African armed forces to do a wide variety of jobs, ranging from maritime and mountain rescue to light transport to medevac to gunship. Of the roughly 2 000 logged hours that I have flown, either as pilot-in-command or as a co-pilot, without doubt the finest were while flying the Alo III, particularly in the Drakensberg on the border between South Africa and Lesotho.

But more about that later.

Learning to fly the Alo III was not easy. Even the most experienced of pilots battled to achieve more than a 70 per cent result in ‘academic’ flying tests. Academic flying is when you fly an aircraft in a strictly predetermined pattern of set speeds, headings, steepness of turns, rates of climb and descent, and precision landings. The sensitivity of the Alo’s controls meant that just thinking, or not thinking – as the case may be – even for a split second, would cause the aircraft to deviate from the desired path. This made accurate academic flying nearly impossible to maintain for the duration of an academic flying test. Nevertheless, there was no compromising on the strict standards of the SAAF, and only those pilots who met these standards were permitted to fly any of the range of SAAF helicopters operationally. I am still proud to count myself among those few who believe that ‘To fly is heavenly but to hover is… divine’.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the aircraft, Captain Dreyer once took me to a ‘confined area landing zone’ situated in a grove of eucalyptus trees close to the wall of Mocke’s Dam, a small reservoir located about 30 kilometres east of Bloemfontein. Surveying the ‘hole’ in the middle of the 30-metre-high bluegums from the air, it seemed absolutely impossible to insert a hovering Alo into the available space, but Captain Dreyer seemed unperturbed. After determining the direction of the wind, we crept towards the opening, came to a stop immediately above it and then inched slowly downward. From this point on, most of the time my eyes were closed as I listened for the crunching sound of rotor blades striking tree trunk and anticipated the helpless dread of the death plunge that would follow as, bereft of lift, we hurtled earthwards to our demise.

^{Flying in the mountains really tests an Alo III pilot’s skills.}

But the next moment there was a slight bump and we landed, gently and quite safely, on a concrete base at the foot of the trees that normally served as a hardstand for tents at the Mocke’s Dam camping site.

‘When you know what you’re doing in the Alo, you can come back and do this “confined” on your own,’ Captain Dreyer advised.

Ja… right.

After the initial shock of its control sensitivity and quirky characteristics, I seemed to adapt quite well to the Alo III and really began relishing it as a mode of transport, even when, as an essential part of our training programme, our instructors started to randomly reduce engine power, at inopportune and inconvenient times, by pulling the engine fuel flow lever back to idle, simulating an engine failure. Your ‘friends’ in this situation are speed and height. The more of each that you have, the more safely, theoretically, a competent pilot can land the aircraft, by giving himself and the aircraft time to set up a life- and aircraft-saving autorotation.

The autorotation works similarly to the toy windmills that some of us had as kids. When you ran with them held out into the airflow, or pointed them into a wind or held them out of the window of a moving car, it spun a basic propeller or rotor on a spindle.

In the case of a helicopter, like the Alouette III, this kinetic-energy-induced rotation of the rotor, above a certain rpm and in the hands of a well-trained pilot, potentially creates sufficient lift to cushion the aircraft’s impact with the ground in the event of engine failure. This is a finely balanced manoeuvre, and must be practised, in all phases of flight, frequently and repeatedly, in order for the pilot to build the confidence necessary to carry out the procedure correctly.

Mostly, these simulations of engine failure, for me at least, were life-lengthening. My heart always stopped dead with the hideous sound of the Alo’s Artouste turbine engine suddenly spooling down and didn’t get going again until we were safely on the ground in one piece. I reckon that if my heart didn’t work at all during the many, many, many times that I practised auto-rotations, the combined effect would be that it would not wear out as quickly as that of pilots who were able to do auto-rotations without panicking.

Fortunately for me and the crews and passengers who flew with me in the Alo over the next few years, none of us were ever required to depend on my skills as an ‘autorotator’ in the normal course of events. Again, I thank my guardian angel for that not inconsiderable mercy.

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